November 07, 2003

Just when you think you would give up your firstborn son in exchange for not having to deal with spam, something comes along that tickles your funny bone. Now, instead of making a fortune on e-bay, I can make a fortune on Google! Amazing! I just have to buy a $50 e-book first. The extremely gullible part of me (my friends know and exploit it well) had to take a second look at the general concept just in case. Something about partnering with online sellers to write adwords for them. Hmm, wouldn't they be writing their own? Anyway, all I know is, if you do a search for AdWords on google, there are 8 sponsored links for other businesses that will also help you make a fortune writing adwords. Does that mean i can make a fortune telling people how to make a fortune? egads, it's all too recursive.

A colleague pointed me towards this article today. I only skimmed it but it was serendipitous as I had just been thinking yesterday how cool the phrase "Internet Librarian" is, how glad I am that that is what Information Today calls that conference, and how glad I am that SLA decided to keep their name.

I know the "L" word has more baggage than the combined total of all bags lost by airlines since air travel began ...

...but I don't want to be known as an "Information Professional." To me, that sounds dry as toast. I'm proud to be an Internet Librarian.

November 06, 2003

Since Google acquired Pyra, there's a note on the blogger website that they no longer offer BloggerPro and will fold most features into one product.

So I'm really curious as to whether this new product will offer categorization. I'm already thinking that I don't want to wait too long for that feature, because I have experience with the nightmare of having to catalog stuff "after the fact," or change a cataloging system in mid-stream. The more items building up in a collection, the less likely anyone is going to be willing to categorize stuff - it can all seem so daunting.

It's funny, my brother and I both work in the information retrieval field, but he has ended up working on perfecting search as a tool, while I'm a big supporter of browsing as an equally viable option (studies show ... blah, blah, blah). Not that he is anti-browse or anything, but it's still interesting that Google embodies the "search is king" philosophy while slightly downplaying the directory option they offer. I think everyone is excited about faceted classification and the way it can support BOTH searching and browsing, yet where are the best practices and tools to implement that approach?

November 05, 2003

Hits to this site are going up, and I swear it's not ALL me. Now I'm glad I put a counter in, but sad I don't have a comments feature happening. That's OK, I haven't said a damn thing of substance yet anyway. I did add a way for people to get in touch with me (trying to avoid words that harvesters might latch onto here ...) in the upper right corner. Can't quite figure out how to adjust that font size although I've tweaked the sizes of the rest of the stuff. When I add catgories I'll put these first few posts in "Boring Beginning Blogging".

Wow, I already got posted about (OK, guys, help me out with the lingo here - I'm a newbie) in LIS Blogsource, The library weblog about weblogs. Thanks Greg.

He notes that I have no RSS feed, how embarrassing. Soon to change, although I'm not saying when.

On the plus side, maybe this will help cement my professional moniker "Intelligent Human Agent" in case I ever go back into independent consulting. I used it in my sig file when posting to SIGIA-L, but I had to switch to nomail back in June when we launched our new website. It is one active listserv and I miss it but damn, I gotta get some work done.

btw, posting on my G4 at work with Safari and the new Panther OS is a lot smoother than at home. For one thing, the preview template function actually works. Oh, and I realize I haven't really talked about what I claim this blog is about, so I promise that will change soon.

That's it for the other one, folks (talk about a cult. If you don't know what this refers to, don't try to figure it out).

November 04, 2003

I proudly showed off my new blog to my brother, who happens to work at Google, (proud new owners of Blogger - which is NOT why I chose this product, as I think my first posts make clear). I guess he read it because he fired off an email to Evan Williams about whether or not posts can have Titles. I was quickly pointed towards the Formatting options under Settings. That's service! Tech support for a free product (I can't guarantee the same for the rest of you peons [joke]).

In the meantime, I skimmed a little bit of the book Essential Blogging and found out that BloggerPro would give me still more options. I was also reassured by some notes about how I could port everything over to Movable Type at a future date if desired.

Next User Interface question: For a new post, why is there only a button for "Preview Your Post" instead of a choice of either previewing or publishing?

So, um, yeah, can you tell by what time it is that I'm kinda diggin' this blog thing? Working on my links while my buddies jeffy, billy, and bobby are picking some sweet music in the garage (do all musicians have a "y" at the end of their name?).

Still pissed that Blogger doesn't let you title or categorize your posts, so I know some day I'll graduate to a competitor (remember the way Spenser Tracy spits out the word "competitor, competitor" in Adam's Rib - or is it Woman of the Year?). But for now I'm recapturing the rush of web publishing I got oh so many years ago when I finally got Fetch and PageSpinner doing their thing. Proof of that is the fact that I just updated a page on my site, which I otherwise haven't touched in about three years.

November 03, 2003

Blogging Blues. What? No separate field for a post title? Bummer. Nevertheless, Blogger wins the first time blogger ease of use prize tonight. Just back from the Internet Librarian conference, all jazzed about RSS and blogging after attending a great work shop given by Steven Cohen and Jenny Levine.

After perusing the nifty comparison chart Jenny and Steven handed out, I lusted after Movable Type, but knew it would take some doing to set up. Radio Userland was the next choice, seemingly far superior to Blogger due to features such as Categories and automatic RSS feed and yet supposedly simple to use. Well it wasn't as easy as advertised. Downloading and installing the software was fast. A good sign of mean and lean code. But when I got to the submit user info page, my crusty old 64 MB, OS 9 G3 with Netscape 4.7 (don't ask) and the 56k modem just froze. And that was that. I had no idea how to take up where I left off after restarting the browser. (I tried pasting the sign up page URL into Explorer, but no dice). I was frustrated and lost, lost, lost.

On to Blogger. It all worked like a charm until, while singing Blogger praises in my very first post, Netscape crashed.

So it took a couple of hours, instead of the promised five minutes, but here I am blogging, posting to my own server, getting my training wheels so I can move on to bigger and better things. I like new beginnings.